John McCracken
4 July – 24 August 2002

Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce a forthcoming exhibition of work by John
McCracken.

John McCracken rose to prominence during the early 1960s as part of a group
of artists working in Southern California. From the outset his work was
associated with Minimalism and his contemporaries include Donald Judd, Robert
Morris, Sol Lewitt and Carl Andre. While his work shares the geometric,
abstract concerns of these other artists, McCracken’s highly polished, brightly
coloured surfaces achieved using resin and lacquer, have been seen as reflecting
a particularly West Coast sensibility.

While McCracken has explored many geometric formats during his career, he is
probably most well-known for his “planks”, elegant lengths of highly lacquered
fibreglass-coated plywood which lean against the wall, so shiny and reflective that
they almost disappear in the gallery space. They are meditations on pure colour
in a reductive geometrical form, presenting what has been described as the
perfect resolution between painting and sculpture.

Since John McCracken’s work first appeared in such ground-breaking exhibitions
as “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum, New York in 1966 and
“American Sculpture of the Sixties” at the LA County Museum in 1967, he has
exhibited extensively in North America and Europe. Solo exhibitions include the
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; P.S.1 New York; Konrad Fisher Gallery,
Dusseldorf; L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, California; Sonnabend Gallery, New
York and the Kunsthalle Basel